"The tyrannous discipline of the 'Bastille,' or Union
Workhouses erected under the New Poor Law of 1834 . . . the vengeful
feeling created, in our starved manufacturing districts, towards the
harsh provisions of that Law, was the fiercest and bitterest I ever
heard expressed by working men."

"It is notorious that all the great remedial measures
which have proved the most effective checks against the abuses of
capitalistic competition are of English origin. Trade Unions,
Co-operation, and Factory Legislation are all products of English
soil. That the revolutionary reaction against
capitalism is equally English in its inspiration is not so generally
known."

Professor H. S. Foxwell: Introduction to Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce
of Labour.

MARK HOVELL

MARK HOVELL(1888-1916)

"There are two distinct aspects to Chartism as generally
conceived down to 1840, and as conceived after that date by the
National Charter Association. On the one hand, it is an
agitation for the traditional Radical Programme; on the other, it is
a violent and vehement protest from men, rendered desperate by
poverty and brutalised by excessive labour, ignorance, and foul
surroundings, against the situation in life in which they found
themselves placed. This protesting attitude had been brought,
by the teachings of leaders and the prosecutions of authority, to a
pitch of bitterness hardly now conceivable."

"It was from the Chartists and their forerunners that Marx and
Lasalle learned much of the doctrine which was only to come back to
these islands when its British origin had been forgotten."

ALTHOUGH born
towards the end of the Victorian era, Mark Hovell
and Julius West (actually a Russian by birth—just) cannot be considered Victorian authors; so why include
them within a library devoted to Victorian writers?

A number of the poets and authors listed in the
Index to this Victorian writers website were involved
actively in the Chartist movement and left us their perspectives on that period
of British socio-political history, mainly the decade from 1838. Of
these, William Lovett,
James Watson and
Ernest Jones were most
closely involved with the movement, but Adams,
Arnott,
Bezer,
Cooper,
Holyoake,
Linton and
Massey also gave of themselves
generously in promoting the aims of the
People's Charter.
They left us their impressions and feelings ― sometimes in
prose, sometimes in verse ― of this struggle of the British
working-class against the oppression and injustice inflicted upon
them by a society dominated overwhelmingly by a wealthy and privileged
(male) minority. . . .

". . . . Deeply impressed with the conviction of the evils
arising from class legislation and of the
sufferings thereby inflicted upon our industrious fellow
subjects, the undersigned affirm that a large majority
of the people of this country are unjustly excluded
from that full, fair and free exercise of the elective
franchise to which they are entitled by the great
principle of Christian equity and also by the British
Constitution, ‘for no subject of England can be
constrained to pay any aids or taxes, even for the
defence of the realm or the support of the Government,
but such as are imposed by his own consent or that of
his representatives in Parliament.’"

Mark Hovell, a professional historian writing some 50
years after the dust thrown up by the pleas and demands of those turbulent
times had mostly settled ― for in Hovell's day
universal suffrage had still to be achieved ― and with research material by then
more readily available, was able to provide a
wider and more objective assessment of the Chartist movement* than
could such as William Lovett, a poor,
self-educated man who had suffered incarceration
for sedition within the appalling prison conditions of that age and
experienced a life not greatly better at other times . . . .

". . . . their memoirs share fully in the
necessary limitations of the literary type to which they
belong. There are failures of memory,
over-eagerness to apologise or explain, strong bias,
necessary limitation of vision which dwells excessively
on trivial detail and cannot perceive the general
tendencies of the work in which the writers had taken
their part. But, however imperfect they may be as
set histories of Chartism, we find in most of them that
same note of simplicity and sincerity that had marked
their authors' careers. If these records make it
patent why Chartism failed, they give a shrewder insight
than any merely external narrative can afford of the
reasons why the movement spread so deeply and kept so
long alive. They enable us to understand how,
despite apparent failure, Chartism had a part of its own
in the growth of modern democracy and industrialism."

A study to both perspectives is important ― indeed, essential ― to
gain a
good (but can it ever be complete?) understanding of the rise of the Chartist movement,
ultimately to become Victorian England's most successful political
failure . . . .

". . . . how many of the greatest movements
in history began in failure, and how often has
a later generation reaped with little effort abundant
crops from fields which refused to yield fruit to their
first cultivators? . . . . in
the long run Chartism by no means failed . . . . the principles of the Charter
have gradually become parts of the British
constitution . . . . its restricted platform of
political reform, though denounced as revolutionary at
the time, was afterwards substantially adopted by the
British State . . . . before all the Chartist leaders
had passed away, most of the famous Six Points became
the law of the land . . . . the Chartists have
substantially won their case. England has become a
democracy, as the Chartists wished, and the domination
of the middle class . . . . is
at least as much a matter of ancient history as the
power of the landed aristocracy."

"The movement's failures lay in the direction of
securing legislation, or national approbation for its
leaders. Judged by its crop of statutes and
statues, Chartism was a failure. Judged by its
essential and generally overlooked purpose, Chartism was
a success. It achieved, not the Six Points, but a
state of mind. This last achievement made possible
the renascent trade union movement of the 'fifties, the
gradually improving organization of the working classes,
the Labour Party, the co-operative movement, and
whatever greater triumphs labour will enjoy in the
future."

Mark Hovell was to become one of many young men of
great promise whose
lives were wasted in the slaughterhouse of the Western Front.† It is to the credit of his friends that his manuscript was prepared
for posthumous publication, for The Chartist Movement has
become a classic of its type.§ Julius West—who at
Professor Tout's request had reviewed Hovell's manuscript and proofsβ—also
died young, in 1918 at the age of twenty-seven, of influenza. A
History of the Chartist Movement was prepared by J. C. Squire
for publication, appearing in 1920.

I have transferred from within the body of Hovell's book
Professor Tout's brief biography of an all-too-brief life, which
appears below followed by J. C. Squire's Memoire of
Julius West.

――――♦――――

* Hovell's account covers the main period of
Chartism to the summer of 1842 when his incomplete manuscript
ends. Professor Tout concludes the story, drawing
on Hovell's notes, knowing his
lectures on Chartism and being aware of his intentions for what
would have been the final section of
his book.

β "It remained to prepare the book for the press. As a first
step I was advised by Mr. Wallas to submit the manuscript to
Mr. Julius West, the author of a recently completed History of
Chartism, whose publication is only delayed by war conditions.
Mr. West has been kind enough to go through the whole manuscript and
also to read the proofs. His help has been of great service,
not only in correcting errors, resolving doubts, and removing
occasional repetitions, but also in advising as to the form which
the publication was to take. He also drew up the basis of the
bibliography. Mr. West informs me that his study and Hovell's
have some points of almost complete agreement, notably where both
differ from recent German writings. It is hardly needful to
say that Mr. West had come to his conclusions before this book had
been put in his hands."

Vermelles Military Cemetery

The Guardian11th August, 1947.

JAQUES――HOVELL. ― On
August 9, at Sale Congregational Church, by the Rev.
George Benton, NORMAN CLIFFORD JAQUES, D.A.
(Manchester), younger son of Mr. and Mrs. J. C. Jaques,
of Prestwich to MAJORIE, only daughter of the late Mark
HOVELL, M.A. and Mrs Hovell, of Sale.

――――♦――――

INTRODUCTION

MARK HOVELL:a brief biography byProfessor T. F. Tout.

THE author of
this book [The Chartist
Movement] belonged to the great class of young scholars of
promise, who, at the time of their country's need, forsook their
studies, obeyed the call to arms, and gave up their lives in her
defence. It is well that the older men, who cannot follow
their example, should do what in them lies to save for the world the
work of these young heroes, and to pay such tribute as they can to
their memory.

Mark Hovell, the son of William and Hannah Hovell, was born
in Manchester on March 21, 1888. In his tenth year he won an
entrance scholarship at the Manchester Grammar School from the old
Miles Platting Institute, now replaced by Nelson Street Municipal
School. It was the earliest possible age at which a Grammar
School Scholarship could be won. From September 1898 to
Christmas 1900 he was a pupil at the Grammar School, mounting in
that time from IIc to Vb on the modern side.
Circumstances forced him to leave school when only twelve years of
age, and to embark in the blind-alley occupations which were the
only ones open to extreme youth. Fortunately he was enabled to
resume his education in August 1901 as a pupil teacher in Moston
Lane Municipal School, whose head master, Mr. Mercer, speaks of him
in the warmest terms. Hovell also attended the classes of the
Pupil Teachers' College. From November 1902 to February 1904 a
serious illness again interrupted his work, but he then got back to
his classes, and at once went ahead. Mr. W. Elliott, who first
gave him his taste for history at the Pupil Teachers' College, fully
discerned his rare promise. "He was," writes Mr. Elliot,
"undoubtedly the brightest, keenest, and most versatile pupil I have
ever taught, and his fine critical mind seemed to delight in
overcoming difficulties. He was a most serious student, but he
possessed a quiet vein of humour we much appreciated. We all
looked with confidence to his attaining a position of eminence."
This opinion was confirmed by the remarkable papers with which in
June 1906 he won the Hulme Scholarship at our University, which he
joined in the following October. This scholarship gives full
liberty to the holder to take up any course he likes in the
University, and Hovell chose to proceed to his degree in the Honours
School of History. During the three years of his undergraduate
course he did exceedingly good work. After winning in 1908 the
Bradford Scholarship, the highest undergraduate distinction in
history, he graduated in 1909 with an extremely good first class and
a graduate scholarship. In 1910 he took the Teachers' Diploma
as a step towards redeeming his pledge to the Government, which had
contributed towards the cost of his education.

"People now
are prone to look upon the stormy and infuriate opposition to the
Poor Law as based upon mere ignorance. Those who think
so are too ignorant to understand the terrors of those times.
It was not ignorance, it was justifiable indignation with which the
Poor Law scheme was regarded. Now, the mass of the
people do not expect to go to the workhouse and do not intend
to go there. But through the first forty years of this century
almost every workman and every labourer expected to go there sooner
or later. Thus the hatred of the Poor Law was well founded.
Its dreary punishment would fall, it was believed, not upon the idle
merely, but upon the working people who by no thrift could save, nor
by any industry provide for the future."

The serious work of life was now to begin. It was the
time when the Workers' Education Association was first operating on
a large scale in Lancashire, and he was at once swept up into the
movement, being appointed in 1910 assistant lecturer in history at
the University with special charge of W.E.A. classes at Colne,
Ashton, and Leigh, to which others were subsequently added. He
threw himself into this work with the greatest energy. He took
the greatest pains in presenting his material in an acceptable form.
His youthful appearance excited the suspicions of some among his
elderly auditors. They used, Mr. Paton tells me, "to lay traps
for him. He seemed to know so much, and they wanted to see if
it was all 'got up for the occasion.' But he was a 'live
wire.' He used to heckle me fine after education lectures at
College." This early acquired skill in debate soon rode
triumphant over the critics. He did not content himself simply
with giving lectures and taking classes. In order to get to
know his pupils personally, he stayed over week-ends at the towns
where he taught. He had long Sunday tramps with his disciples
over the moors, and though he never flattered them, and was perhaps
sometimes rather austere in his dealings with them, he soon
completely won their confidence and affection. I remember the
embarrassment felt by the administrators of the movement, when a
class, which had had experience of his gifts, almost revolted
against the severely academic methods of a continuator of his
course, and was only appeased when it was fortunately found possible
to bring him back to his flock without compromising the situation.
He continued in this work as long as he was in England, and when the
winter of 1913-14 took him to London, he had the same success with
the south-country workmen as with the men he had known from youth up
in the north. Mr. E. H. Jones, the secretary of his Wimbledon
class, thus describes the impression he made there with a course on
the "Making of Modern England":

Many of the students had
misgivings as to the success of what appeared to them as a dull,
drab, and dreary subject. These doubts were further increased
when, at the first preliminary meeting, a slim, quiet, unassuming,
and nervous young man got up, and in a hesitating manner outlined
the chief features of the course. The first lecture, however,
was sufficient to ensure the success of the venture. His
thorough knowledge of the subject, his clear and incisive style,
together with a charming personality, held the attention of the
class. His realistic description of the condition of the
people, especially of the working classes, during the early part of
the nineteenth century — the homes they lived in and the lives they
lived — showed us at once a man with a large heart, one who
sympathised with the sorrows and the sufferings of the people.
His great desire was to serve his fellows by educating, and so
exalting the manhood of the nation. We, who knew him,
understand the motives which prompted him to offer his life for the
sake of our common humanity. He hated tyranny; the beat of the
drums of war had no charms for him, unless the call was in the cause
of Justice and Liberty." [The Highway, December 1916,
pp. 56-57.]

This appreciation is not overdrawn. There was nothing
in Hovell of the clap-trap lecturer for effect. His rather
conservative point of view knew little of short cuts, either to
social amelioration or to the solution of historic problems.
He offered sound knowledge coupled with sympathy and intelligence,
and it is as much to the credit of the auditors as of the lecturer
that they gladly took what be had to give.

Howell's lecturing, important as it was, could only be
subsidiary to the attainment of his main purpose in life. As
soon as he graduated, he made up his mind to equip himself by
further study and by original work for the career of a university
teacher of history. His degree course had given him a
practical example of the character of two widely divergent periods
of history, studied to some extent in the original authorities.
One of these was the reign of Richard II., which he had studied
under the direction of Professor Tait. He had sent up a degree
thesis on Ireland under Richard II., written with a maturity and
thoughtfulness which are rarely found in undergraduate essays.
This essay he afterwards worked into a study which we hope to print,
when conditions again make academic treatises on mediaeval problems
practical politics. It was evidence that he might, if he had
chosen, become a good mediaevalist. But his temper always
inclined him towards something nearer our own age, and his other
special subject, the Age of Napoleon I., seemed to him to lead to
wide fields of half-explored ground in the first half of the
nineteenth century. He attended for this course lectures of my
own on the general history of the period, and made a special study
of some of the Napoleonic campaigns, which he studied under the
direction of Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, then lecturer in Military
History at Manchester, and now Chichele Professor of that subject at
Oxford. It was Mr. Wilkinson's lectures that first kindled his
enthusiasm for military history.

Howell's main bent was towards the suggestive and
little-worked field of social history, and his interest in the
labour and social problems in the years succeeding the fall of
Napoleon was vivified by the practical calls of his W.E.A. classes
upon him. I feel pretty sure that it was the stimulus of these
classes that finally made him settle on the social and economic
history of the early Victorian age as his main subject. It was
upon this that he gave nearly all his lectures to workmen.
Indeed, much of the vividness and directness of his appeal was due
to the fact that he was speaking on subjects which he himself was
investigating at first hand. A deep interest in the condition
of the people, a strong sympathy with all who were distressfully
working out their own salvation, a rare power of combining interest
and sympathy with the power of seeing things as they were, made his
progress rapid, and increasing mastery only confirmed him in his
choice of subject. Finally he narrowed his investigations to
the neglected or half-studied history of the Chartist Movement, and
examined with great care the economic, social, and political
conditions which made that movement intelligible.

". . . . In truth the aspect of Great Britain in these
days was sufficiently terrifying. From Bristol to
Edinburgh and from Glasgow to Hull rumours of arms,
riots, conspiracies, and insurrections grew with the
passing of the weeks. Crowded meetings applauded
violent orations, threats and terrorism were abroad.
Magistrates trembled and peaceful citizens felt that
they were living on a social volcano. The frail
bonds of social sympathy were snapped, and class stood
over against class as if a civil war were impending."

Hovell's teachers were not unmindful of his promise, and in
1911 his election to the Langton fellowship, perhaps the highest
academic distinction at the disposal of the Arts faculty of the
Manchester University, provided him with a modest income for three
years during which he could carry on his investigations, untroubled
by bread problems. He now cut down his teaching work to a
minimum, and threw himself wholeheartedly into his studies.
Circumstances, however, were not very propitious to him. He
was a poor man, and was the poorer since his abandonment of school
teaching involved the obligation of repaying the sums advanced by
the State towards the cost of his education. The work he now
desired to do was perhaps as honourable and useful as that for which
he had been destined. It was, however, different. He had
received State subsidies on the condition that he taught in schools,
and he chose instead to teach working men and University students.
So far as his bond went, he had, therefore, nothing to complain of.
The Board Education, though meeting him to some extent, was not
prepared, even in an exceptional case, to relax its rules
altogether. While recognising the inevitableness of its
action, it may perhaps be permitted to hope that the time may come,
even in this country, when it will be allowed that the best career
for the individual may also be the one which will prove the most
profitable to the community. Otherwise, the compulsion imposed
on boys and girls, hardly beyond school age, to pledge themselves to
adopt a specific career may have unpleasant suggestions of something
not very different from the forced labour of the indentured coolie
or Chinaman.

Other difficulties stood in Howell's way. He had to
continue his W.E.A. classes until he had completed his obligations
to them, and it required moral courage to avoid accepting new ones.
The University also had its claims on him, and untoward
circumstances made his lectureship much more onerous than it had
been intended to be. In the spring of 1911 a serious illness
kept me away from work, and between January and June 1912 the
University was good enough to allow me two terms' leave of absence.
On both occasions Howell was asked to deliver certain courses of my
lectures, and I shall ever be grateful for the readiness with which
he undertook this new and onerous obligation. But he gained
thereby experience in teaching large classes of students, and it all
came as part of the day's work. Despite this his study of the
Chartists made steady progress.

A further diversion soon followed. Up to now Hovell's
work had lain altogether in the Manchester district, and
Wanderjahre are as necessary as Lehrjahre to equip the
scholar for his task. The opportunity for foreign experience
came with the offer of an assistantship in Professor Karl
Lamprecht's Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschichte at Leipzig
for the academic session of 1912-1913. This offer, which came
to him through the kind offices of Sir A. W. Ward, Master of
Peterhouse, was the more flattering since the Leipzig Institute was
a place specially devised to enable Dr. Lamprecht to disseminate his
teaching as to the nature and importance of Kulturgeschichte.
Reduced to its simplest terms Lamprecht's doctrine is that the
social and economic development of society is infinitely more
important than the merely political history to which most historians
have limited themselves. Not the State alone but society as a
whole is the real object of the study of the historian.
Various doubtful amplifications and presuppositions involved in
Lamprecht's teaching in no wise impair the essential truth of the
broad propositions on which it is based.

"The night falls fast, and finds me brooding thus
O'er evils that afflict my fatherland:—
The night falls fast, yet brightly luminous
Beam out the cotton mills that round me stand,
Where garish gas turns night to day; and hand,
And eye, and mind of myriad toilers win
The wealth of England, but cannot command
A certainty of bread,—though, for her sin,

Hovell's own studies of social history showed him to be
predisposed to sympathy with the master. But he had never been in
Germany, and his German was almost rudimentary. However, he worked
up his knowledge of the tongue by acquiring from Lamprecht's own
works the point of view of the great apostle of Kulturgeschichte.
Accordingly by the time Hovell reached Leipzig, he bad acquired the
keys both of the German language and of Lamprecht's general
position. He found that Lamprecht's Institute, though loosely
connected with the University, was a self-contained and
self-sufficing seminary for the propagation of the new historic
gospel, and looked upon with some coldness and suspicion by the more
conservative historical teachers. It was a wise part of the
system of the Institute that certain foreign "assistants" should
present the social history of their own country from the national
point of view. Towards this task Howell's contribution was to
be an exposition of the social development of England in the
nineteenth century, so that his Chartist studies now stood him in
good stead. He was, however, profoundly convinced of the high
standard required from a German University teacher, and made
elaborate preparations to give a course of adequate novelty and
thoroughness. Unfortunately he found that the students who
gradually presented themselves were far from being specialists.
They were not even anxious to become specialists, and were nearly
all somewhat indifferent to his matter, looking upon the lectures
and discussions as an easy means of increasing their familiarity
with spoken English.

The beginning was rather an anxious time, especially when
presiding over and criticising the reading of the referate,
or students' exercises, which alternated with his set lectures.
He was impressed with the power of his pupils to write and discuss
their themes in English, though glad when increasing familiarity
with German enabled him also to deal with their difficulties in
their own tongue. The only other academic work that he essayed
was taking part in Professor Max Förster's English seminar.
The lightness of the daily task gave him leisure for looking round,
and seeing all that he could see of Germany and German social and
academic life. He attended many lectures, delighting
especially in Förster's clear and stimulating course on Shakespeare,
broken on one occasion by a passionate exhortation to the students
to forsake their beer-drinkings and duels, and to cultivate manly
sports after the English fashion, so as to be able the better to
defend their beloved Fatherland. He was much impressed by
Wundt, the psychologist, "a little plain and unassuming-looking man
dressed in undistinguished black, lecturing with astounding
clearness and strength, at the age of 81, to a closely packed and
attentive audience of fully 350 students, who look on him as the
wonder of his age, and are eager to catch the last words that might
come from the lips of the master." He heard all that he could
from Lamprecht himself, with whom his relations soon became
exceedingly cordial. He found him genial, friendly, and
good-natured, and he was impressed by his dominating personality and
missionary fervour, his broad sweep over all times and periods, the
width of his interests, and the extent of his influence. He
sincerely strove to understand the mysteries of the new science.
The very abstractness and theoretical character of the Lamprechtian
method was a stimulus and a revelation to a man of clear-cut
positive temperament, schooled in historical teaching of a much more
concrete character. It was easy to hold his own in the English
seminar where the discussions were in his own tongue. But he
gradually found himself able to take his share in Lamprecht seminar,
where all the talk was in German. "My reputation among the
students," he writes, "was founded on my knowledge that the
predecessor of the Reichsgericht sat at Wetzlar." It was a
proud moment when he had to explain that the master's confusion of
the modern English chief justice and the justiciar of the twelfth
century was the natural error of the foreigner. He was still
more gratified when called upon by Lamprecht to read an elaborate
treatise in German on the der englische Untertanenbegriff,
the English conception of political subjection. His only
embarrassment now was that he could never quite convince himself
that there was any specifically English conception of the subject at
all, and that he rather wondered whether Lamprecht knew whether
there was one either. But however much he criticised, he never
lost his loyalty to the man. His doubts of the Lamprechtian
system became intensified when he found underlying it errors of
fact, uniform vagueness of detail, and cut-and-dried theoretical
presuppositions against which the broad facts of history were
powerless to prevail. One of his last judgments, made in a
letter to me in June 1913, is perhaps worth quoting:

Professor Lamprecht is lecturing
this term on the history of the United States. His course is
exceedingly interesting, but I am bound to say that his history
strikes me as highly imaginative. He never speaks of the
English colonies. They are always "teutonisch," except when
(as to-day) be says in mistake "deutsch." Thus Virginia in
1650 was "teutonisch." He persistently depreciates the English
element on the strength of the existence of a few Swedish, Dutch,
and German settlements. By some magic English colonists cease
to be English as soon as they cross the ocean, so that their desire
for freedom and political equality owes little or nothing to the
fact of their being English. He carefully distinguishes even
Scots from English. He views the history of America down to
1763 as an episode in the eternal struggle of the "romanisch " and "teutonisch"
peoples, and the beginning of the decided triumph of the latter,
whose greatest victory of course was in 1870-71. I am firmly
convinced that he neither understands England, nor the English, nor
English history. Still, although I don't agree with half he is
saying, I find his method of handling things interesting; he
stimulates thought, if only in the effort to follow his.

The whole period at Leipzig was one of intense activity.
Hovell enjoyed himself thoroughly. He was always eager to
widen his experiences, and found much kindness from seniors and
juniors, Germans and compatriots. He made a special ally of
his French colleague, who did not take Kulturgeschichte quite
so seriously as he did. The two exiles spent the short
Christmas recess in a tour that extended as far as Strasburg, where
they moralised on the contrasts between the new Strasburg, that had
arisen after 1871, and the old city, that still sighed for the days
when it was a part of France. At Leipzig Hovell revelled in
the theatres, in the Gewandhaus concerts, the singing of the
choir of the Thomas Kirche, and the old Saxon and Thuringian
cities, churches, and castles. He was specially impressed with
the orderly development from a small ancient nucleus of the modern
industrial Leipzig, with its well-planned streets and spacious
gardens, with which the Lancashire towns which he knew contrasted
sadly. He attended all manner of students' festivities, drank
beer at their Kneipen, and witnessed, not without severe
qualms, the bloodthirsty frivolities of a students' duel. He
was present when the King of Saxony, whose personality did not
impress him, came to Leipzig to spend a morning in attending
University lectures and an afternoon in reviewing his troops.
He saw Gerhard Hauptmann receive an honorary degree, and delighted
in the poet's recitation of a piece from one of his unpublished
plays. He was so quick to praise the better sides of German
life that he was condemned by his French colleague for his excessive
accessibility to the Teutonic point of view. His appreciation
of German method extended even to the police, whom he eulogised as
efficient, and not too obtrusive in their activities. He
recognised the thoroughness, economy, and thriftiness with which the
Germans organised their natural resources. He spoke with
enthusiasm of the ways in which the Germans studied and practised
the art of living, their adaptation of means to ends, their
avoidance of social waste. He was struck with the absence of
visible slums and apparent squalor. The spectacle of the
material prosperity obtained under Protection led him to wonder
whether the gospel of Cobden in which, like all good Manchester men,
he had been brought up, was necessarily true in all places and under
all conditions. But he had enough clarity of vision to see
that there was another side to the apparent comfort and opulence of
Leipzig. He was appalled at the lack of method and
organisation when individual enterprise was left to work out details
for itself, as was notably instanced by the slipshod, happy-go-lucky
ways in which the affairs of the Institute and University were
conducted. He watched with keen interest elections for the
Saxon Diet or Landtag, when Leipzig's discontent with the
constitution of society rose triumphant over an electoral system as
destructive to the expression of democratic control as that of the
Prussian Diet itself. Things could hardly be well when Leipzig
returned, by overwhelming majorities, both to the local and to the
imperial Parliaments, Social Democrats pledged to the extirpation of
the existing order. A constitution, cunningly devised to
suppress popular suffrage, and manhood voting yielded the same
result.

". . . . The Chartists first compelled attention
to the hardness of the workmen's lot, and forced
thoughtful minds to appreciate the deep gulf between the
two "nations" which lived side by side without knowledge
of or care for each other. Though remedy came
slowly and imperfectly, and was seldom directly from
Chartist hands, there was always the Chartist impulse
behind the first timid steps towards social and economic
betterment. The cry of the Chartists did much to
force public opinion . . . ."

Another aspect of German opinion was strange and painful to
him. He had been taught that in Germany the enthusiasts for
war were as negligible an element as the "militarists" of his own
land. But he soon found that the truth was almost the reverse
of what he had expected. From the beginning he was appalled,
too, by the widespread evidence of deep-rooted hostility to England,
even in the academic circles which received him with the utmost
cordiality. The violence of the local press, the denunciations
of England by stray acquaintances in trains and cafes, seemed to him
symptomatic of a deep-set feeling of hatred and rivalry. He
saw that Lamprecht studied English history in the hope of
appropriating for his own land the secret of British prosperity, and
that Förster exhorted the students to play football that they might
be better able to fight England when the time arrived, and that both
were confident that the time would soon come. He was disgusted
at the crass materialism he saw practised everywhere. He was
particularly moved by a quaint exhortation to the local public to
contribute handsomely to celebrate the Emperor's jubilee by
subscribing to a national fund for missions to the heathen. No
one saw anything scandalous or humorous in a spiritual appeal based
on the most earthly of motives, and centring round the arguments
that a large collection would please the Kaiser, and that, as
England and America had used missionaries as pioneers of trade and
might, Germany must also "prepare the way for world-power by the
faithful and unselfish labours of her missionaries in opening up the
economic and political resources of her protectorates." He saw
that Deutschland über alles meant to many Germans a curious
dislocation of values. An agreeable young privatdocent,
who visited him later in England, showed something of the same
spirit when, coming with a Manchester party on an historical
excursion to Lincoln, he saw nothing to admire in the majestic city
on a hill nor in the wonderful cathedral. Far finer sites and
much better Gothic art were, he solemnly assured us, to be seen in
Saxony and the Mark of Brandenburg. Very few of his many
German friends had Hovell's keen sense of humour.

Hovell's stay in Germany was broken by a visit to England at
Easter 1913, when he attended the International Historical Congress
in London, where he introduced me to Lamprecht. I was much
impressed with the fluency and accuracy which Hovell's German speech
had now attained, as well as with the cordiality of his relations to
his large German acquaintance. He returned to Leipzig for the
summer semester, and was back in England for good by August.

The novel Leipzig experiences had thrown the Chartists into
the shade, the more so as Hovell found the University Library
capriciously supplied with English books, and catalogued in somewhat
haphazard fashion. But he profited by the opportunity of a
careful study of the important works which notable German scholars
had recently devoted to the neglected history of modern British
social development. He found some of these monographs were
"too much after the German style, rather compendia than analytical
treatises, but useful for facts, references, and bibliographies."
Others of the "more philosophic sort" gave him "good ideas," and he
regarded Adolf Held's Zwei Bücher über die sociale Geschichte
Englands "specially good." Steffen's Geschichte der
englischen Lohnarbeiter, the translation of a Swedish book by a
professor at Göteborg, and M. Beer's Geschichte des Socialismus
in England were also extremely useful. But he was soon on
his guard against the widespread tendency to wrest the facts to suit
various theoretical presuppositions, and to realise the fundamental
blindness to English conditions and habits of thought that went
along with laborious study of the external facts of our history.
Though he by no means worked up all his impressions of German
authors into his history, the draft, which he left behind him, bears
constant evidence alike of their influence and of his reaction from
it. It was at this time he first saw his work in print in the
shape of a review of Professor Liebermann's National Assembly in
the Anglo-Saxon Period, contributed to a French review.

On returning to England Hovell established himself in London,
where he worked hard at the Place manuscripts (unhappily divided
between Bloomsbury and Hendon), the Home Office Records, and other
unpublished Chartist material. During the winter he took a
W.E.A. class at Wimbledon. By the summer of 1914 he was ready
to settle at home again and to put together his work on the
Chartists. His fellowship now coming to an end, he undertook
more W.E.A. courses in the Manchester district for the winter of
1914-1915, and a small post was found for him at the University,
where he received charge of the subject of military history.
This study the University prepared to develop in connection with a
scheme for preparation of its students for commissions in the army
and territorial forces.

No sooner were these plans settled than the great war broke
out. The classes in military history were reduced to
microscopic dimensions, since all students keen on such study
promptly deserted the theory for the practice of warfare.
Though anxious to follow their example, Hovell remained at his work
until the late spring of 1915, finding some outlet for his ambition
to equip himself for military service in the University Officers'
Training Corps, in which he was a corporal. In May, as soon as
his lectures to workmen were over, he applied for a commission.
He had nothing of the bellicose or martial spirit; but he had a
stern sense of obligation and a keen eye to realities. Like
other contemporaries who had sought experience in Germany, he fully
realised the inevitableness of the struggle, and he knew that every
man was bound to take his place in the grave and prolonged effort by
which alone England could escape overwhelming disaster. "I
don't think," he wrote to me, "I shall dislocate the economy of the
University by joining. What troubles me is of course my book.
I have written nearly a chapter a week since Easter. At this
rate I shall have the first draft nearly completed by the end of
another three months, and I am therefore very keen to finish it.
If there were no newspapers I could keep on with it; but the
Chartists are dead and gone, while the Germans are very much alive."

In June Hovell was sent to a school of instruction for
officers at Hornsea, where they gave him, he said, the hardest
"gruelling" in his life, and from which he emerged, at the end of
July, at the head of the list with the mark "distinguished" on his
certificate. He was gazetted in August to a "Kitchener"
battalion of the Sherwood Foresters, the Nottingham and Derby
Regiment. But officers' training had not yet become the deftly
organised system into which it has now developed. When Hovell
joined his battalion at Whittington Barracks, near Lichfield, he
found himself one of a swarm of supernumerary subalterns, who had no
place in the scheme of a battalion fully equipped with officers.
As there were no platoons available for the newcomers to command,
they were put into instruction classes, hastily and not always
effectively devised for their benefit. He rather chafed at the
delay but enjoyed the hard life and the new experience. It was
soon diversified by a course of barrack-square drill with the Guards
at Chelsea, by an informal assistantship to a colonel who ran an
instructional school for officers, by a very profitable month at the
Staff College at Camberley, where he soon "felt quite at home,
seeing that the place is so like a University with its lecture-rooms
and libraries and quiet places," and by a period of musketry
instruction in Yorkshire, where an evening visit to York gave him
his first practical experience of a Zeppelin raid. Altogether
a year was consumed in these preliminaries.

In June 1916 Hovell was back with his battalion, now camped
in Cannock Chase. On June 3 he married Miss Fanny Gatley of
Sale, the Cheshire suburb in which his own family had lived in
recent years. A little later he wrote: "We managed a whole
week in the Lake District, where it rained all the time. Then
I went back to my regiment and my wife came to stay two miles away."
Then the attack on the Somme began, and "we heard rumours that
officers were being exported by the hundred." On July 4 he
received orders to embark, and crossed to France a week later.
There were some vexatious delays on the other side, but at last he
joined one of the regular battalions of his regiment in a small
mining village. The battalion had been cruelly cut up in the
recent fighting on the Somme, and the officers, old and new, were
strangers to him. But by a curious accident he found an old
friend in the chaplain, the Rev. T. Eaton McCormick, the vicar of
his parish at home. He was now plunged into the real business
of war, and did his modest bit in the reconstitution of the
shattered battalion. "I blossomed out," he wrote, "as an
expert in physical training, bayonet fighting, and map-reading to
our company. All the available N.C.O.'s were handed over to my
care, and they became enthusiastic topographers."

Before the end of the month the battalion was reorganised and
moved back into the trenches. On August 1 he wrote to me in
good spirits:

Behold me at last an officer of a
line regiment, and in command of a small fortress, somewhere in
France, with a platoon, a gun, stores, and two brother officers
temporarily in my charge. I thus become owner of the best
dug-out in the line, with a bed (four poles and a piece of stretched
canvas), a table, and a ceiling ten feet thick. We are in the
third line at present, so life is very quiet. Our worst
enemies are rats, mice, beetles, and mosquitoes.

This first experience of trench life was uneventful, and the
battalion went back for a short rest. The remainder of the
story may best be told in the words of Mr. McCormick, writing to
Hovell's mother to tell her the news of her son's death.

Mark and two other officers of the
Sherwood Foresters dined with me on Wednesday last, August 9.
We were a jolly party and talked a lot about home. After
dinner he asked me if it would be possible for him to receive the
Holy Communion before going into the trenches, and next morning I
took him in my cart two miles away, where we were having a special
celebration for chaplains. That was the last I saw of him
alive. He went into the trenches for the second time in his
experience (he had been in a different part of the line the week
before) on last Friday. On Saturday night at 9.10 P.M.,
August 12, it was decided that the Sherwood Foresters should explode
a mine under the German trenches. Mark was told off to stand
by with his platoon. When the mine blew up, one of Mark's men
was caught by the fumes driving up the shaft, and Mark rushed to his
rescue, like the brave lad that he was, and in the words of the
Adjutant of his battalion, "we think he in turn must have been
overcome by the fumes. He fell down the shaft and was killed.
The Captain of the company went down after him at once and brought
up his body.". . . They knew that he was a friend of mine, as
I had been telling the Colonel what a brilliantly clever man he was,
and what distinctions he bad won, so they sent for me, and the men
of his battalion carried his body reverently down the trenches.
We laid him to rest in a separate grave, and I took the service
myself. It was truly a soldier's funeral, for, just as I said
"earth to earth," all the surrounding batteries of our artillery
burst forth into a tremendous roar in a fresh attack upon the German
line.... He has, as the soldiers say, "gone West" in a blaze of
glory. He has fought and died in the noblest of all causes,
and though now perhaps we feel that such a brilliant career has been
brought to an untimely end, by and by we shall realise that his
sacrifice has not been in vain.

Over a year has passed away since Hovell made the supreme
sacrifice, and the cannon still roar round the British burial-ground
amidst the ruins of the big mining village of Vermelles where he
lies at rest. While north and south his victorious comrades
have pushed the tide of battle farther east, the enemy's guns still
rain shell round his unquiet tomb from the hitherto impregnable
lines that defend the approach to Lille.

Nothing more remains save to record the birth on March 26,
1917, of a daughter, named Marjorie, to Hovell and his wife, and to
give to the world the unfinished book to which he had devoted
himself with such extreme energy. This work, though very
different from what it would have been had he lived to complete it,
may do something to keep his memory green, and to suggest, better
than any words of mine can, the promise of his career. But no
printed pages are needed to preserve among his comrades in the
University and army, his teachers, his friends, and his pupils, the
vivid memory of his strenuous, short life of triumphant struggle
against difficulties, of clear thinking, high living, noble effort,
and of the beginnings of real achievement. For myself I can
truly say that I never had a pupil for whom I had a more lively
friendship, or one for whom I had a more certain assurance of a
distinguished and honourable career. He was an excellent
scholar in many fields; he could teach, he could study, and he could
inspire; he had in no small measure sympathy, aspiration, and
humour. He possessed the rare combination of practical wisdom
in affairs with a strong zeal for the pursuit of truth; he was a
magnificent worker; he kept his mind open to many interests; he had
a wonderfully clear brain; a strong judgment and sound common-sense.
I had confidently looked forward to his doing great things in his
special field of investigation. How far he has already
accomplished anything noteworthy in this book, I must leave it for
less biased minds to determine. But though I am perhaps
over-conscious of how different this book is from what it might have
been, I would never have agreed to set it before the public as a
mere memorial of a promising career cut short, if I did not think
that, even as it is, it will fill a little place in the literature
of his subject. When he finally set out for the front he
entrusted to me the completion of what he had written. I have
done my best to fulfil the pledge which I then gave him, that should
anything untoward befall him, I would see his book through the
press.

". . . . in 1917, in the midst of the Great
War, Parliament is busy with a third wide extension of
the electorate which, if carried out, will virtually
establish universal suffrage for all males, and,
accepting with limitations a doctrine which Lovett
considered too impracticable even for Chartists, will
allow votes to women under a fantastic limitation of age
that is not likely to endure very long"[Ed. ―
in fact, until 1928.]

"The Chartists were especially interesting as being in some
sort pioneers of the modern Labour movement in which West had grown
up; but he might have been drawn to any other such subject had he
found another that had been so neglected by English historians. It
did not take him long to discover that some current opinions would
have to be revised; that the physical menace of the Chartist
movement had often been exaggerated, and its historical importance
generally ignored."

J. C. Squire

INTRODUCTORYMEMOIREbyJ. C. Squire.

JULIUSWEST was born in St.
Petersburg on March 21 (9th O.S.), 1891. In May, when he was
two months old, he went to London, where from that time onwards, his
father, Mr. Semon Rappoport, was correspondent for various Russian
papers. At twelve years of age West entered the Haberdashers'
(Aske's) School at Hampstead. He left school in 1906, and
became a temporary clerk in the Board of Trade, assisting in the
preparation of the report on the cost of living in Germany, issued
in 1908. On leaving the Board of Trade, he became a junior
clerk in the office of the Fabian Society, then in a basement in
Clement's Inn. (It was there that in 1908 or 1909 I first saw
him.) To get to the Secretary's room one had to pass through
the half-daylight of a general office stacked with papers and
pamphlets, and on some occasion I received the impression of a new
figure beyond the counter, that of a tall, white-faced, stooping
youth with spectacles and wavy dark hair, studious-looking, rather
birdlike. The impression is still so vivid that I know now I
was in a manner aware that he was unusual long before I was
conscious of any curiosity about him. I had known him thus
casually by sight for some time, without knowing his name; I had
known his name and his repute as a precocious boy for some time
without linking the name to the person. He was said to read
everything and to know a lot of economics; a great many people were
getting interested in him; he was called West and was a Russian, a
collocation which puzzled me until I learned that he was a Jew from
Russia who had adopted an English name. Although still under
twenty, he was already, I think, lecturing to small labour groups
when I got to know him more intimately. He knew his orthodox
economics inside out, and was in process of acquiring a peculiar
knowledge of the involved history of the Socialist movement and its
congeners during the last hundred years.

He was, in fact, already rather extraordinary. His
education had been broken off early, and he always regretted it; but
I have known few men who have suffered less from the absence of an
academic training. Given his origins, his early struggle, his
intellectual and political environment, the ease with which he
secured some sort of hearing for his first small speeches to
congenial audiences, one might have expected a very different
product. It would not have been surprising, had he, with all
his intellect, become a narrow fanatic with a revolutionary
shibboleth; it would not have been strange if, avoiding this because
of his common sense, he had been drawn into the statistical machine
and given himself entirely to collecting and digesting the materials
for social reform. He took a delight in economic theory and he
had a passion for industrial history: the road was straight before
him. But the pleasure and the passion were not exclusive.
Although it is possible that his greatest natural talents were
economic and historical, and (as I think) likely that had he lived
his chief work would have been along lines of which the present book
is indicative, he was in no hurry to specialize. He had a
catholic mind. Behind man he could see the universe, and,
unlike many Radicals of his generation, behind the problems and the
attempted or suggested solutions of his time, he could see the wide
and long historical background, the whole experience of man with the
lessons, moral, psychological and political, which are to be drawn
from it, and are not to be ignored. You may find in his early
writings (though not in this book) all sorts of crudities,
flippancies and loose assertions; he was young and impulsive, he had
been under the successive influences of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Chesterton,
and lacked their years and their command of language; he had a full
mind and a fluent pen which, when it got warm, sometimes ran away.
But at bottom he was unusually sane; and his sanity came in part
from the intellectual temper that I have sketched, but partly from a
sweet, sensitive and sympathetic nature which made injustice as
intolerable to him as it was unreasonable. He did not always
(being young and having had until the last year or two little
experience of the general world of men) realize how people would
take his words; but I never knew a man who more quickly or more
girlishly blushed when he thought he had said or written something
wounding or not quite sensible.

"The great
interest of the Chartist period is the active quest for ideas which
was then being carried on, and its first results. Within a few years
working men had forced upon their attention the pros and cons of
trade unionism, industrial unionism, syndicalism, communism,
socialism, co-operative ownership of land, land nationalization,
co-operative distribution, co-operative production, co-operative
ownership of credit, franchise reform, electoral reform, woman
suffrage, factory legislation, poor law reform, municipal reform,
free trade, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, the
nationalist idea, industrial insurance, building societies, and many
other ideas. The purpose of the People's Charter was to effect joint
action between the rival schools of reformers; but its result was
to bring more new ideas on to the platform, before a larger and
keener audience."

West: ideas put forward by the Chartist
Movement.

Julius West's life was conspicuously a life of the mind.
But if the reader understands by an intellectual a man to whom books
and verbal disputations are alone sufficient, reservations must be
made. It is true that he was a glutton for books: he collected
a considerable library where Horace Walpole, Marx, Stevenson, Mr.
Conrad, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Marlowe stood together.
His father writes: "He was a great reader, and his literary taste
even as a schoolboy was remarkable. He scorned to read books
written specially for children, but used to enjoy the reading of
classical writers even at the age of seven or eight years, and his
knowledge of all Shakespeare's dramas was astonishingly complete."
But he was restless and roving rather than sedentary. He was
capable of running great physical risks and enduring hardships
beyond his strength; he travelled as much as he could, and had the
authorities admitted him into the Army, he would, unless his body
had given out, have made a good soldier. He did not mistake
books for life; but one had the feeling that life to him was
primarily a great book. His nature was emotional enough: he
fell in love; he was deeply attached to a few intimate friends; and
there was an emotional element in his politics and his reactions to
all the strange spectacles he saw in his last years of life.
But ordinarily what one thought of was his curiosity rather than his
emotions; his senses not at all. If at one moment one had
peeped into his affectionate nature the next one was always carried
off into some "objective" discussion. His curiosity about
things, his love of debate, gave him a refuge during trouble and an
habitual resort in ordinary times. He seemed incapable of any
idle thing. Most of us, with varying frequency, will make
physical exertions without obtaining or desiring reward beyond the
effort and the fatigue; or we will lie lapped in the gratification
of our senses, happy, without added occupation, to drink wine or sit
in silence with a friend and tobacco, or encumber a beach and feel
the hot sun on our faces, or loll in a green shade without even a
green thought. Or we will travel and see men and countries, or
take part in events for the mere exhilaration of doing it. But
whatever his physical activity, Julius West would always have been
the curious spectator, observing and learning, recording and
deducing, with history in the making around him; and, whatever his
physical inactivity, his brain would never have been asleep, or his
senses dormant. If one walked with him, there were few
silences; a punt on the river with him would have meant (unless he
were reading) eager, peering eyes and speculations either about the
surrounding objects, and what people had said about them, or else
about Burke, Bakunin or some such thing. For all his energy, I
never knew his ambition, or was clearly convinced that he had any
other ambition than to see and learn all he could, and produce his
results.

He attempted all sorts of literary work; parodies, short
stories, criticism. It was to be expected that the criticism
would be chiefly concerned with doctrine, and that the other work
would be defective and full of ideas. Partly, I suppose, all
this writing was the by-product of an intellectual organ which could
not stop working but demanded a change of work; partly his very
curiosity operated: he saw what other men had written, and he wanted
to find out what it would be like to write this, that and the other
thing. But he had neither the sensuousness nor the selfishness
(if that hard word may be used of that detachment and that
preoccupation) of the artist, nor the reverence for form that
demands and justifies an intense application to general detail which
is not, to the hasty eye, very significant. As a rule he was
exclusively preoccupied with the general purport of what he wanted
to say. But it was not unnatural that a young man with his
heart, his imaginative intelligence and his wide reading, should
have begun his career as an author with a book of poems. (The book
published by Mr. David Nutt in 1913 was called Atlantis and Other
Poems.) It was ignored by the reviewers and the public; he
would not have denied that it deserved to be; but it was very
interesting to any one interested in him. A great part of it
(remember, most of the verses had been written by a boy under
twenty-one) was very weak; short poems about mermaids, sunken
galleons, maidens, dreams, ghosts and witches, written in rhythms
which are lame, but displaying in the ineffective variety of their
form the restless ingenuity, the hunger for experiment of this young
author; and here and there lit up by a precocious thought or phrase.
A man with a greater share of the poetic craft was likely to do
better with a larger subject and a looser structure, and much the
best poem in West's book is Atlantis, a narrative in about
five hundred lines of blank verse, with a few songs embedded in it.
The blank verse is as good as most; few men of West's age could
write better; and he could without contortion move in it, and make
it say whatever he wanted it to say. He represents the Lost
Continent as dwindled to a small island and inhabited by people
conscious of their impending doom, weighed down with the memory of
what their country's forests and fields and birds were like before
the last wave. The subject offered an obvious chance as a
visible spectacle, and the poet (feeling this) made an attempt to
paint the features of the city, describing its houses and temples
and festivals. The attempt was unsuccessful; it was when he
reached more congenial ground that West showed his originality and
his power. With one of the most alluringly "picturesque" and
melodramatic subjects in the world under consideration, he put all
the obvious things behind him and spent his time considering what
effects such a situation as that of the doomed remnant of Atlanteans
would have had upon the minds of men. Passionate love became
almost extinct:

and 'twas thought 'twas well
No helpless childish hands there were to pull
Their elders' heartstrings, making death seem hard
And parting very bitter, and the end
A bitter draft of pain, poured by a hand
Unpitying, a draft of which the old
Were doomed to drink more than a double share.

The poets

Did all but cease th' eternal themes to
sing
And in their place sang songs about the End.

The philosophers ran to strange doctrines about the perfectibility
of the survivors from the next deluge or starkly expounded the End,
or were

Buffoons who sought to turn the End a
thing
For jest;

and across the city sometimes flashed a band of fanatics proclaiming
this shadowed life to be an illusion from which those who had
courage and faith could escape. Voices spoke, sad or
resentful, of men cheated out of their due years; one fierce

For us an aimless life, an aimless Death
. . .
That I should have the power for once to live,
To be a creature strong with power to kill,
To stay, but for a little while, the strength
That hems us in! That I might taste the joy
Of conflict with an equal force to mine,
Conflict of life and death, not purposeless,
Not vain, as we now feebly struggle on. . . .
That I could have the gift of knowing hate,
Black hate that animates before it kills. . . .
O, to do aught with force, not rest supine.

In this boyish poem we can see West's mind trying to realize
Atlantis as a whole community, where characters vary and doctrines
clash; as a vessel holding, at a certain position in time and space,
the human spirit.

Whether he would have written more poetry I do not know.
I doubt it; at all events he had little time and many distractions,
and he looked like growing confirmed in other pursuits. In
1913 he went into the office of the New Statesman, for which,
intermittently, he wrote reviews (usually of books about Eastern
Europe) and miscellaneous articles until he died. He remained
in the office for a few months; then left, and became a free lance
writing for various papers, lecturing, and starting work on the
present book and others. I think his second publication was a
tract, notable for its sagacity and its wit, on John Stuart Mill.
He was busy with several books when the war broke out, which in the
end was to kill him at twenty-seven.

I forget if it was in August, 1914, that he first tried to
join the Army. A layman might have supposed that both his eyes
and his lungs were too weak, but a doctor told him that he was good
for active service. Whenever it was that he volunteered—his
first attempt was early, and there were others after his short visit
to Russia and Warsaw in 1914-15—he made a discovery. He had
not realized—if he had ever known it the conception had dropped out
of his mental foreground—that he was not a British subject.
But they told him so, and said that his status must be settled
before he could have a commission. He had arguments: his
parents were Russian subjects and he himself was born in Russia; but
his parents were merely visiting Russia when he was born, and he
submitted that he was at that time really domiciled in England.
The argument, it seemed, had no legal validity; and, denied
citizenship in the only home he knew or wanted, he at once went,
very set and intent, to a solicitor's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields
where I had the odd experience of assisting, as I believed, to
naturalize a man I had never thought of as a foreigner. This,
he thought, would settle it; he would soon be in the Army. But
no. The hierarchy at this point thought of something new.
He was a Russian, an Ally of military age; if he wished to fight he
must join the Russian army; we would not naturalize him here.
It would have been difficult to conceive a more grotesque
suggestion, if one knew the man. He had left Russia when a
baby in long clothes; he spoke Russian (at that time) with
difficulty; he looked at Russia and her institutions from an English
point of view; he was married (he had been confirmed in the Church
of England) to the daughter of an English clergyman; all his friends
were English and most of them in uniform and it was suggested that
if he really desired to serve the Allied cause he should divest
himself of all his ties and go off to mess in the snows of Courland
or Galicia with bearded strangers from the Urals and the Ukraine.
The suggestion was repulsive to him, quite apart from the fact that
it might mean years of unbroken exile. He was, however,
allowed to join an ambulance corps in London.

Before long he was off to Petrograd on a flying tour as a
correspondent; thence to Moscow and Warsaw, within sound of which
the German guns were booming: Russian Warsaw with enemy aeroplanes
overhead and expensive Tsarist officers revelling in the best
hotels. He saw the Grand Duke Nicholas on November 17, 1914,
in the greatest Cathedral of Petrograd at a gorgeous service of
commemoration of the miraculous preservation of the Tsar Alexander
II: that was six years ago! He returned, and for a year and
more was in England, editing Everyman and writing books at a
great pace. Then his wife died. Another opportunity of
going to Russia offered, and a man always restless took it as a
means of escape from himself. He was in Petrograd in the early
months of the Bolshevik regime. He lived (a few letters came
through) in a state of high excitement, seeing everything he could,
visiting the Institute and the Bolshevik law courts, attending
meetings at which Lenin and Trotsky spoke, dogged everywhere, for he
was suspected, daily expecting to be shot from behind. Being a
democrat and a believer in ordered progress he was very angry with
the Bolsheviks; having a zest for queer manifestations of life he
found an immense variety of interest and amusement in their conduct.
When he returned he was full of stories of rascality. Lenin,
on the point of character, was in many ways an exception; but he was
tricked wholesale by German Jew agents disguised as Bolsheviks.
One of them, high in the Bolshevik Foreign Office, had even
judiciously edited the Secret Treaties, the publication of which so
edified the Bolshevik public and so surprised the world. Daily
great stacks of documents were served out to the Bolshevik press, a
dole for this paper, a dole for that; but the busy German spy had
taken the last precaution to ensure that the documents which
involved the Allies should come out, and that those which most
seriously compromised Germany should not. West became pretty
familiar with many of the revolutionary figures, and enjoyed working
in such an extraordinary scene. But he recognized that his
excitement was hectic and bad for him; he suffered to some extent
from the famine conditions of Petrograd; the cold was terrible, and
that and the indoor stuffiness which it led to affected his chest.
He had to get away. In February, 1918, he left with a party of
English governesses and elderly invalids. He was not an old
man nor a governess; he was in effect an English journalist of
fighting age who might be carrying valuable information; but he was
fortified with some lie or other, and with the rest of the pathetic
caravan he went over the ice and through the German lines. The
enemy were at that time in occupation of the Aland Islands, and West
told a romantic story of the night he and his companions spent in a
village there guarded by the German soldiers: a night filled with
snow, a silence broken by guttural voices talking of home and the
fortunes of the war in Flanders.

He got through to Stockholm and from there home, where,
unexpected and unannounced he floated in on me, keen and volatile as
ever, but looking ill. He ought then to have taken a long
rest; but he was asked to go off to Switzerland—then a hotbed of
enemy and pacifist intrigue—and he thought that with his experience
and his knowledge of languages (he now knew Russian, French, German,
Dutch, and Roumanian) it was his duty to go. But it killed
him. He came back, hollow-eyed and coughing, and went first to
an hotel in Surrey, and then to a sanatorium in the Mendips.
His friends did not know how ill he was; he wrote cheerfully about
books and politics, asked for more books, was glad he had found an
invalid officer or two with cultivated tastes. But he just saw
the war out. A complication of influenza and pneumonia
developed, and he died.

During the war he had published several books. Two—Soldiers
of the Tsar and The Fountain—were issued by the Iris
Publishing Company, the proprietor of which, now dead, deserves a
book to himself. The first was a collection of sketches
written mostly in Russia in 1914; the second a tumultuous race of
satires and parodies probably modelled on Caliban's Guide to
Letters. The agèd Reginald at the end observes:

And oh, my children, be not afraid of your own
imaginations. Once in the distant ages before our universe was
born, when Time was an unmarked desert, and God was lonely, He let
the fountain of His fancies Play, and life began. Be you, too,
creators, for there is none, even among my own grandchildren, who
has not in him a vestige of that impulse which made the earth.

The book was written on this principle; perhaps the fountain played
too fast; but its many-coloured spray shows how various was the
manipulator's knowledge and how active his mind. The other
books were G. K. Chesterton: a Critical Study (Seeker), an
abridged translation of the de Goncourt Journal, published by
Nelson's, and translations of three plays by Tchekoff and one by
Andreieff. The translation from the Goncourts, produced at a
great pace, is really good: lively, vivid, idiomatic. The
monograph, though independent and containing plenty of reservations,
was an exposition of the theory that Mr. Chesterton "is a great and
courageous thinker." West, though not blind to his subject's
genius as artist and humorist, characteristically concentrated on
his opinions about religion and politics; his own were revealed
en passant. "The dialogues on religion contained in The
Ball and the Cross are alone enough and more than enough to
place it among the few books on religion which could safely be
placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an
intelligence." Magic and Orthodoxy together "are
a great work, striking at the roots of disbelief." During the
war "those of us who had not the fortune to escape the Press by
service abroad, especially those of us who derived our living from
it, came to loathe its misrepresentation of the English people. . .
. Then we came to realize, as never before, the value of such men as
Chesterton." It was an impulsive book, but there was a great
deal of very acute analysis in it. The one book, however,
which has a reasonable chance of long survival is the present
History of Chartism.

"One after the other the Chartist leaders found themselves in prison. The winter of 1839-40 saw the Home Office prosecutions in full
blast, but by the middle of 1840 their work was completed and
virtually, without exception, the principal sources of Chartist
energy were no longer able to cause the Government any anxiety. About this time the total number of Chartists thus out of the way
was between three and four hundred."

West: the period of repression.

Now it really is rather remarkable that this book should have
come from the same man, the same very young man, as the works
mentioned above. We still produce, and it is a good thing we
do, men who take an interest in everything and talk, whether
shallowly or with the instinct of genius, or both, about literature,
science and politics, relating them all. But if a man does
this, one can never expect him to be also a specialist (except,
rarely, in some literary subject) who is capable of research and
loves documents. An essay on Chartism we might expect; an
exposition of its real or supposed principles; an idealization of
the movement. But we do not expect a man with the habits of
the literary-political journalist to grub for years amongst
pamphlets and manuscripts in the British Museum, and produce a
chapter of history containing and relating a "mass of new facts."
But that is what West did, and he did it concurrently with his other
miscellaneous work; editing, reviewing, translating, speaking, and
the rapid composition of topical books. The Chartists were
especially interesting as being in some sort pioneers of the modern
Labour movement in which West had grown up; but he might have been
drawn to any other such subject had he found another that had been
so neglected by English historians. It did not take him long
to discover that some current opinions would have to be revised;
that the physical menace of the Chartist movement had often been
exaggerated, and its historical importance generally ignored.
But, whatever might have been his conclusions, he loved finding
things out; almost anything would do. He had a prodigious
memory that would enable him to correct at a moment's notice a
misstatement as to the percentage of one-roomed tenements in
Huddersfield, or the name of the Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster in Mr. Gladstone's first Government. He could read
anything with interest and he forgot nothing that he read. At
the British Museum he went through all the available Chartist
literature like a caterpillar. Then one day, with great
excitement and amusement, he came to tell me that he had discovered
at the Hendon annexe scores of manuscript volumes put together by
Francis Place which had never been examined by any previous English
writer. Every sort of Chartist trifle had been "pasted up" by
the industrious tailor; the obscurer the newspaper from which
Place's cuttings came, the greater West's pleasure. He liked
them for their own sakes; but he retained his sense of proportion,
and I do not think that those more competent to judge than I, who
read this book, will think that West swamped his general outline
with his own lesser discoveries. And he had none of the
jealous greed of the baser kind of research worker. He would
have given his results to any one. When he was nearly through
his book, there was announced a book on somewhat similar lines by
another young student, the late Mr. Hovell. West showed no
fear that his own work might be rendered worthless, but (I think)
volunteered to assist in preparing it for the press.

I will add no more, for his most important achievement and
his memorial are here—except that the proofs of the volume have been
read by myself, no expert; and that had he lived to revise them
himself he would probably have removed what errors may be found.